Activities (work) in organizations such as corporations are becoming increasingly competitive, and accordingly it is important to improve the abilities of individuals belonging to organizations and the competence of the organizations. To realize this goal, individuals are required not only to accumulate ostensible technical knowledge but also to positively tackle problems pertaining to the organization, properly exchange information both within and outside of the organization, challenge others with their knowledge, and create knowledge in a broad sense.
On the contrary, many individuals belonging to an organization are in an “instruction waiting” state to achieve only those things they are instructed to do, or in an inactive state of wasting accessible information that is important for achieving an objective of the organization. These states are frequently obstacles to attaining an objective of the organization or corporation. For example, there may be a member of an organization who faithfully achieves only those assignments instructed by a supervisor in the organization. Even if the situation changes and the member foresees a problem occurring when directly carrying out only the instructed assignments, the member accomplishes the instructed assignments without change, thereby inflicting further problems on the organization and other members of the organization.
To cope with such circumstances and develop the abilities of individuals and organizations, many training activities in a variety of methods are carried out in organizations and dedicated training institutions.
For example, frequently used learn-through-experience methods include role-playing in a workplace scenario which gives each participant a specific role and lets the participants act out a problem, a business game that models the activities of a corporation with competitive conditions and makes participants manage the model corporation, a case study that analyzes successful or unsuccessful corporation examples, or wars, a training game that employs a game to set up a specific simulated situation at a training site and makes participants experience the situation, and orienteering in which participants trace points set in a rural area and on a map according to specific rules.
Other frequently used methods include a walk rally carried out by pairs of contestants that walk according to course information written with specific rules and a set walking speed and compete for the correctness of routing and speed, and an F1 in which a pair of people prepare (P-process) travel information about a predetermined course and another pair in the same team travels (D-process) along the course with the use of the information, to reach checkpoints and the goal faster than competing pairs, thereby accomplishing a task.
Problems to be solved by the invention
The role-playing method may be effective for individuals to gain a certain understanding and sympathy through actions. However, it involves a problem of hardly improving organizational ability. The business game method may be useful for understanding the importance of decision making and a sense of cooperation in organizations but it involves problems of high development cost in practical application and imposing heavy burdens on teachers. It also involves difficulty in properly evaluating results. The case study method only analyzes past examples in which results are already known, and such examples are virtual reality for participants who may not sense the tense feeling of the problem from desk studies.
Also, the training game method may easily attract the interest of participants and draw active interest therein but it has problems of simply providing entertainment and not providing results. The orienteering and walk rally methods may improve analytic and judgmental abilities but it has a problem of providing only an easy sense of play. The walk rally and F1 methods require participants to work in pairs when performing the tasks, and therefore, one may take a leadership role and the other may simply follow, which will hardly improve individual abilities. The participants only compete for final time and barely recognize competitive relationships with others during the play, causing a problem of rarely bringing out individual abilities. The orienteering method is based on simple rules of reading maps and advancing, and accordingly needs no demonstration of deep insight.
Under these circumstances, the present inventor has studied actual work habits and procedures in organizations such as corporations, compared actual workplace situations with the above-mentioned learn-through-experience methods, and extracted the characteristics of the actual workplace. Namely, in the actual workplace, the actions and attitudes (for example, the degree of endeavor) of individuals directly influence not only individual results but also organizational results. It is necessary for each individual to accomplish his or her work by himself or herself. If one abandons his or her task midway, it will worsen individual and organizational results. If the actions of a member of an organization are improper, it badly affects the results of other members of the organization. In other words, even if an individual in an organization improves their ability to properly cope with work, an improper action by another in the organization can deteriorate individual and organizational results.
In addition, the actions and attitudes of an organization and its members are greatly affected by the presence of a leader and the method of leadership. This is different from desk studies. Individuals must wholly carry risks and advance through tense realities. These characteristics have been extracted by the present inventor.
However, the above-mentioned conventional methods have the problems previously explained, and therefore, are unable to make participants experience such essential work characteristics.
An object of the present invention is to provide an education set and a work model, a training method, and a work efficiency improving method employing the same, capable of allowing participants to efficiently experience the essence of work in a short period at low cost and greatly improving the intellectual creativity, knowledge, and abilities of individuals and organizations.